Mitt Romney and his super PAC are pouring energy, money and manpower into next week’s Alabama and Mississippi primaries, attempting to gain a firmer upper hand over his challengers and perhaps finally clock a victory in a competitive Southern contest.

To win either of those deepest of Deep South locales would be to reverse what has become, for Romney supporters, one of the most dismaying and embarrassing trends of the 2012 primaries: that Romney could become the GOP nominee, but only after being roundly and repeatedly rejected in the party’s geographic core.

Even as his campaign argues that Romney has amassed a decisive delegate lead over his GOP opponents, his weakness across the South remains a glaring deficiency. The only Southern state Romney has taken so far is Virginia, where Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum failed to qualify for the ballot. Everywhere else — from South Carolina in January to Tennessee and Georgia this week — Romney has lost by significant margins, getting routed with voters who call themselves “very conservative” and among the white evangelicals who make up much of the GOP base, according to exit polls.

Team Romney could well counter, “So what?” Both Alabama and Mississippi distribute delegates proportionally and it’s unlikely that either Gingrich or Santorum can make a serious dent in Romney’s delegate lead. In these states, as well as the others Romney has already lost, there’s no doubt that he would win them as the nominee.

Even if the delegate math doesn’t add up, a Santorum win in these states — or the Kansas caucuses this weekend — would further underscore Romney’s problems among conservatives and give the former Pennsylvania senator additional energy as the primary drags onward.

There are plenty of signs that Romney strategists are reluctant to accept that their candidate will never be a Southern kind of guy. Advisers have been eyeing areas where his establishment-businessman profile might have appeal as the super PAC Restore Our Future has softened up both states by pummeling Romney’s opponents on the air.

In other words, they’re doing what it would take to win there — if winning is even an option.

“We’re an underdog. But we are an organized underdog who’s got a base that’s excited here in Mississippi, so we have a shot,” said Austin Barbour, the Mississippi Republican strategist supporting Romney.

Though the March 13 states look like more hospitable terrain for Santorum and Gingrich, Barbour suggested that a full airing of Romney’s record — focused on his electability, private-sector background and fiscal management in Massachusetts — could win over voters in urban and suburban areas, along the Gulf Coast and in the fast-growing Memphis suburbs in the northern part of the state.

“The focus really, throughout this race, has been on all these other states. It hasn’t been on the South,” Barbour said. “We win because we do well on the coast, we do well in the city of Jackson, we do well in pockets of the Jackson suburbs and then we do well in DeSoto County.”

Former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, a Romney endorser and fundraiser, said that “even in Mississippi” there was a sense that it’s time for Republicans to begin rallying behind an eventual nominee.

“Inevitability is setting in. … People who have been holding out now for a while are ready to get behind him,” Lott said, suggesting that voters “have seen some of the baggage that Newt and Rick have.”

With women voters in particular, Lott said, “Newt certainly has problems in that area.”

As of Thursday, all three major GOP candidates are set to have a paid-media footprint in Alabama and Mississippi. The pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future reserved nearly $700,000 in airtime for the two weeks before the primaries and Santorum’s campaign invested about $100,000 in cable TV and radio ads starting Thursday, media-buying sources said.

By far the most imposing presence on the airwaves, in the mail and over the telephone lines, has been Romney, whose super PAC boosted him and pounded Santorum with well over $1 million in TV ads and no fewer than four pieces of campaign mail. The pro-Romney group Restore Our Future has also run automated calls attacking Santorum in both March 13 states. Starting Thursday, the Romney campaign is airing six figures’ worth of ads.

Romney has also earned a host of gold-plated endorsements in both states, including from Lott and Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, former Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, and most Alabama and Mississippi statewide Republican officials. That may count for something in states that GOP strategist Chris Henick, a Mississippi native, described as having a “sleepily surprised realization that this presidential primary is upon everybody.”

“Mississippi has always been more of a regimental, establishment state when it comes to presidential politics,” he said. “You would think Romney has that built-in advantage — and he does, in terms of endorsements.”

Still, veteran local politicos say it would take a confluence of lucky events for Romney to win a pair of states that are as conservative and evangelical as they come — and entirely alien from Romney’s brand of New England Republicanism.

“I’d guess Newt would probably win, but it’s going to be close between him and Santorum,” said Clarke Reed, the longtime operative known in Mississippi as the father of the state’s Republican Party. “It’s a strong, evangelical element that we’ve got. I’m kind of one of them, but I’m probably going to vote for Romney.”

Bradley Byrne, a former Alabama state senator who ran for governor in 2010, said flatly: “I don’t think Gov. Romney’s going to be in a position to win Alabama.”

“I think he’ll have a reasonably good showing here, I just don’t think he’ll come in first, nor do I think he’ll come in second,” Byrne said. “Partly, it’s just geographic. He’s not from down here. … Whether this perception is accurate or not, they perceive that he’s not as conservative as we are.”

It remains to be seen just how hard Romney will campaign in the Deep South primaries. He’s due to visit Pascagoula and Jackson, Miss., and Birmingham, Ala. on Thursday and Friday but hasn’t announced a full schedule beyond that. Santorum and Gingrich have committed to participating in a Monday night candidates forum hosted by the Alabama Republican Party; Romney has not.

Gingrich and Santorum, meanwhile, have already started on a whirlwind campaign tour of the March 13 battlefields, explicitly pointing to Tuesday’s votes as a chance for Republicans to send a not-Romney message and force another extension of the primary season.

For Romney to win next week, or to come in second in one or both states, he’ll be counting in part on Gingrich and Santorum to keep the conservative vote divided, with Gingrich leveraging his Southern cultural appeal to peel support from the more politically resilient Santorum.

The consolation prize, in any case, would be a handful of the 90 delegates up for grabs. T.J. Maloney, the executive director of the Alabama Republican Party, said “it’s not unrealistic to think all four candidates” might win some delegates in the contests he described as almost a joint primary.

“Alabama and Mississippi, since we’re going on the same day — geographically, demographically, we’re almost the same state,” he said.

That means the pair of states has the potential to send a strong signal in the Republican primary, one way or another, by swinging to the same candidate on the same night.

And regardless of the outcome, Republicans say that for once, they won’t have to worry about general election fallout from an explosive primary fight.

“It’s a strong social issue state, a heavy Bible Belt state,” Reed said. “And I think they’d accept Romney with pretty much open arms. The hard-core South is — we’re hard-core. We’ll be there regardless.”